The joyous side of jazz

Tools

Jane
Monheit has good reason to be smiling from the cover of last month's Down Beat. She recently left the world
of indie labels behind to release her latest album on Sony.

At a time
when jazz is not exactly flying off the shelves at music stores and record
labels are dropping veteran players, there's one corner of the jazz world where
the sun is shining. Female vocalists are enjoying a resurgence of interest,
and, at the age of 27, Monheit is, as Down
Beat's cover proclaims, "The 'It' Girl."

Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the
Hollywood Bowl, and the great jazz festivals of Europe --- Monheit's played
them all. But when she visits Rochester next week she'll be performing in the
kind of setting she enjoys the most, a small club.

"That's the
place where this music really belongs, where it sounds best," Monheit said in a
recent phone conversation. "This music is not really meant to be over-amplified
or to fill a massive space. It's better in a small venue. And we get to have
more fun. It's a looser environment where we can interact with people who come
to the show from the stage. I'll always play small venues."

Monheit's career began to flower in
1998 when, at the age of 20, she placed second in the prestigious Thelonious
Monk International Jazz Competition. But she doesn't believe she took off a
moment too soon.

"I was pretty ready for it. I had
just graduated college and I already had an apartment with my fiancé, so many
parts of my life were all sealed up. My love life was exactly where I wanted it
to be. I wasn't worried about chasing boys or doing some of the other things
that 20- and 21-year-olds are doing. I was really ready to move forward with my
career."

Monheit had decided on that career
long before.

The daughter of an
actress-singer-dancer and a businessman who also played banjo, she'd grown up
listening to jazz, show tunes, and bluegrass every day. She remembers when, at
the age of five, her teacher asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up.

"All the other kids were like, 'I'll
be a fireman.' I wanted to be a jazz singer. It was really sort of set in
stone."

On Monheit's current CD, Taking a Chance on Love, she wraps her
gorgeous soprano around songs from MGM movie musicals. With a diverse selection
of tunes including "Dancing in the Dark" and "Over the Rainbow" and supporting
musicians like Romero Lubambo, Christian McBride, and Lewis Nash, the album is her
finest yet.

With almost her entire career built
on standards, Monheit laments the fact that Broadway --- at one time the great
generator of classic tunes --- has turned to the retreads of Abba, Billy Joel,
and others.

"There's a dearth of good
songwriters. Or maybe they're out there and we're just not paying attention,
that's the thing that scares me the most."

She has a surprising notion of where
the next generation of tunesmiths might be found.

"Some of the songwriters who I think
are the best and the wittiest are the people dealing with animation, the Trey
Parkers, Matt Stones, and Seth McFarlands of the world who are writing for South Park and Family Guy and things like that. Hey guys, write us a Broadway
show. Clean it up a little bit so we can bring the kids."

When I saw Monheit in Philadelphia a
few years ago the highlight of her show was Antonio Carlos Jobims' "Waters of
March," an enigmatic, poetic composition.

"There's an old wives' tale that says
it's the clues to a murder," says Monheit. "I heard from someone else that it's
things Jobim would see traveling home everyday. What I do know is that it's the
happiest and saddest song in the whole world about wonderfully mundane things
that make our absolutely glorious everyday lives. It's everything and nothing
in the most wonderful way."

With a terrific upbringing, a happy
marriage (to her drummer, Rick Montalbano), and a career that has gone straight
up, has Monheit faced the kind of life experience that would lend authenticity
to her singing? Her answer is disarming.

"I think the great misconception
about jazz is that in order for life experience to have value when applied to
your music, it has to be bad life experience. What the hell is up with that? It
cracks me up to think about it," she says. "Why can't this music be about
joyfulness and happiness and love? Has everybody missed the point about Ella
Fitzgerald? This woman sang from the most beautiful, glorious, happy place. If
any of us could ever feel what she must have felt like during those ecstatic
moments.... "

Monheit loves the music of Billie
Holiday and others who interpreted songs through a prism of turbulence, but she
insists that applying her own life experience is also valid.

"Just because we have some icons that
really were able to communicate through their hard times, I feel like
everyone's forgotten about the people who communicated through their great
times. Every time I get on stage, everything I do is informed by joy. I can't
understand why people think that's wrong."

Jane
Monheit plays Thursday, February 3, at Milestones, 170 East Avenue, at 7
and 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $23 to $25. 325-6490